Full coverage of the corona crisis
Almost every other country puts us to shame, testing thousands – especially heroic medical staff – to help beat the virus. The greatest insult? Britain HAS the kits... but they’re sold abroad because UK labs can’t cope. It’s why today the Mail demands the
A BRITISH firm producing millions of pounds worth of coronavirus tests is selling most of them abroad as the UK doesn’t have enough laboratories to use them.
Novacyt has made £17.8million selling its testing equipment to more than 80 countries via its Southampton-based subsidiary Primerdesign.
But only £1million worth has been sold to the UK, raising questions about why Britain is not buying more at a time when there are global shortages of tests.
When asked why the UK had not bought more kits and ramped up testing more quickly, Novacyt group marketing manager Achilleas Neophytou claimed UK laboratory capacity was a ‘limiting factor’.
This included staff available to carry out testing as well as the need for chemicals, he said.
But last night a Public Health England ( PHE) spokesman claimed Novacyt was not providing more tests because it was ‘not able to offer the guaranteed continuity of supply we were looking for’.
Ministers are battling to increase testing to 25,000 patients per day by mid-April, but figures remained below 10,000 per day last weekend.
Mr Neophytou said: ‘Even if we delivered ten times the number of kits to the Government, the limiting factor is still capacity of testing and that comes more and more under strain if laboratory staff go into self-isolation.
‘A huge lab could also be brought below capacity if you do not have the consumables and instruments you need to run the tests.
‘We are supplying 21 hospitals in the UK. Some of those serve other hospitals across the country. Some do not have the internal capacity to do these tests.
‘So the number of testing kits is not truly representative of what the actual testing capacity of the country is at the moment.’ Novacyt said it is currently supplying 21 NHS hospitals with Covid-19 tests, which are processed by experts in labs.
It is in discussions with PHE about providing more tests, Mr Neophytou said.
However, orders for its kit – which can return test results in two hours – have surged internationally, with regulators in the US, Argentina, the Philippines and Indonesia all fasttracking the product for use by medical professionals.
Novacyt said it had sold £1.4million of tests to India alone, while countries in the Middle East had bought another £ 1.6million worth. It is ramping up production with the help of Manchesterbased Yourgene and says it will soon be capable of producing four million tests per month.
Novacyt is one of several organisations working with health authorities to roll out wider testing for the coronavirus.
Last week the Government said it was also working with dozens of universities, research institutes and companies to create three new ‘hub laboratories’ to supplement testing already being carried out.
Test makers Randox and Thermo Fisher are involved in these efforts, as well as Amazon, Royal Mail, Boots and the Wellcome Trust.
Universities have donated testing machines and volunteered staff to work in the new facilities, with hopes it will help ramp up the UK testing regime.
There are separate efforts as well to develop so- called rapid tests that do not need to be carried out in laboratories, although PHE is still reviewing these and has not yet recommended them for widespread use.
The World Health Organisation has called on countries to ‘test, test, test’, saying it is the best way to track the coronavirus outbreak and help bring down infection rates. Cabinet Office Minister Michael Gove said the Government was increasing the amount of testing.
But during a daily press conference, he admitted: ‘One of the constraints on our capacity to increase testing overall is the supply of the specific reagents, the specific chemicals that are needed in order to make sure that tests are reliable.’
Last night the Department of Health suggested the tests provided by Novacyt were not as efficient as those being offered by other companies.
They also claimed that the tests wouldn’t avoid the issue of the shortage of chemical reagents, as highlighted by the Government.
It came as more than 10,000 frontline NHS staff wrote to the Prime Minister to demand proper protective equipment. Jenny Harries,
‘More and more under strain’ ‘Constraints on our lab capacity’
the deputy chief medical officer, admitted there had been ‘distribution issues’ but insisted the UK had enough personal protective equipment (PPE) to cope with the pandemic.
Millions of masks, gloves, aprons and other items were delivered to hospitals on Monday, the Government said, with the Army helping to get them out nationwide.
The letter to Boris Johnson has been co-ordinated by EveryDoctor, a membership organisation of UK doctors which campaigns on safety in the NHS.
It says NHS guidelines on what medics should wear to treat Covid-19 patients are not stringent enough and should be brought into line with World Health Organisation recommendations. The statement has been signed by more than 20,000 medics, including 10,000 who work in the NHS, in less than two days.
OVER 45 years ago, as a young councillor and college lecturer, I was surprised to find a police superintendent on my doorstep. I was even more surprised, with my guide dog ruby by my side, when the officer accused me of driving a Mini through a Sheffield suburb.
When I gently pulled his leg about the absurdity of this accusation, he declared that he didn’t find it very funny. It certainly wasn’t for me either. So I pointed out to him what day it was . . . April 1st. ‘ What is the significance of that?’ he retorted.
It transpired that one of my students had filed a false report for a joke that nearly went very badly wrong. A single incident like this is amusing. When overzealous investigations start happening right across the country, it is cause for alarm.
In recent days, I have read with growing concern of officious, heavy-handed policing that, petty as it is, threatens to have a profound effect on this country’s long-standing liberties.
This must never become a nation where people risk arrest for walking their dogs, visiting beauty spots or making impulse buys.
Yet within a few days of the lockdown introduced by the Government last week, and the emergency powers that were granted to police, abuses were being reported by TV and newspapers.
Derbyshire police sent drones up to spy on walkers in the Peak District, and were accused of dumping dye in a lake to deter visitors.
A bakery manager in Edgware, North London, was threatened with an £80 fine for spraying chalk lines onto the pavement, to help her customers maintain a safe distance while queuing. Did that officer ever take such a view on the graffiti that defaces so many walls in London and other cities?
I am far from alone in feeling worried by a sudden crackdown on inconsequential offences.
There’s an old maxim: give people a bit of power and they will inevitably abuse it. It’s a cynical attitude and one that I’m glad to say is often disproved, but there’s a kernel of truth there.
Warning voices have already been sounded. A former Supreme Court judge, Jonathan Sumption, who retired in 2018, spoke eloquently on The World At One on Monday, expressing his fears that Britain could slide into becoming a ‘police state’ if it gave way to ‘collective hysteria’.
When a Supreme Court judge and, dare I say, a former Home Secretary (once regarded as a hardliner) find that they share the same deep- seated concerns about Britain’s liberties, it is time to take notice.
Both Lord Sumption and I share a fundamental belief that policing should be by consent. We have a citizen’s police force, not a paramilitary one. Our justice system works on the principle of a social contract: we agree to abide by the law and the police keep us to it.
Other countries, such as those in Europe with a history of fascist or communist dictatorship, have a different tradition of policing.
There, it is imposed from the top down. That is not the British way, and nobody should wish to see it imposed on us, even temporarily.
Before sittings were suspended in the House of Lords, I argued passionately during the debate on the Emergency Powers Bill for proportionality and balance. Unusually, I was advocating a lighter approach than many of my colleagues, particularly those who are Liberal Democrats.
My reasoning is simple: if we are to ensure that people do something that they don’t want to do, and remain indoors without the freedom to visit loved ones, they have to be won over.
The alternative, that they are made to comply through fear and force, is unthinkable. I’m pleased to say in my own area, the South Yorkshire police have applied a light touch. This, I believe, is a result of lessons learned after the miners’ strike in the early Eighties, when heavy-handed policing did serious damage to public trust that took decades to repair. South Yorkshire police seem determined not to repeat those mistakes.
Contrast that with the neighbouring authority of Derbyshire, which has used aerial shots of walkers in the Peaks to shame people into staying indoors. This is entirely the wrong approach.
Big Brother should not be watching us while we take the dog out, not least because it is a misuse of valuable police resources. Forces were already depleted by cuts before the current crisis began: in some parts of the country, up to 25 per cent of officers are now self
isolating with coronavirus symptoms. With police numbers so low, it is folly to harass the public for perceived breaches of social distancing. People need to be persuaded with reason, not treated as criminals.
I applaud Met Commissioner Cressida Dick, who said: ‘We are all getting used to the new restrictions and I’ve been very clear that in the first instance I want my officers to be engaging with people, talking to people, encouraging them to comply — explaining, of course if they don’t understand and only as a very last resort with the current restrictions, using firm direction or even enforcement.’
Real crime has not stopped during the lockdown. On the contrary, scammers and fraudsters are more active than ever, targeting the elderly and vulnerable.
Police must not use their emergency powers for the sake of it. Jack Grealish, an overprivileged Premier League footballer with Aston Villa, broke lockdown regulations this week to go partying at a friend’s house. His club have quite rightly fined him for his stupidity in putting lives at risk from the spread of Covid-19 and he has apologised for his behaviour. He should be deeply ashamed, not least because hours earlier he had been preaching on social media about the importance of staying at home.When the crisis is over, we will need police to apply their new zeal to crimes that are too often ignored these days. It’s ludicrous that shoppers can be fearful of buying easter eggs when the sale of hard drugs goes largely unchecked in our cities’ parks.
Today is April Fool’s Day. But the British people are not fools and should never be treated that way. We must be trusted to keep our side of the bargain. It is imperative the police must not overstep theirs.
Lord Blunkett was a member of the Cabinet from 1997-2005 and is now Professor of Politics in Practice at the University of Sheffield.